(Huge) delegate vote anomaly in Alabama verified

[Liberty1789]

As pointed out by dsw in the Daily Paul's post below, a really strange gap is visible between Paul's popular vote in Alabama's primary and thevote count in favor of his delegates, as it all happens on the same day through the same ballot. If you are not familiar with the enigma addressed here, I can only encourage you to read the post linked below first.

http://www.dailypaul.com/223002/voti...about-this-one

I think that it is worthwhile separating the discussion of this one in its own thread as the mathematical analysis and speculative interpretations are quite different from the other issues raised elsewhere.

As per Republican Party Rules, you could only vote for 1 candidate, and then only for the delegates of that candidates. For each of your candidate's delegate proposed, you had to choose between a Mr Jones or a Mr Smith to get the job. A rather complicated affair as illustrated by the typical ballot:



And that is only the first of the two pages...

A Gingrich supporter had to trawl through a list of 9 separate delegate contests, Paul 16, Romney 18 and Santorum 3. Voter's fatigue is very visible in the data: almost 20% of the electorate failed to reach the end of the delegate list after it started to fill it in!

I have collected all the precinct information available as of today (60 counties out of 67), ie 1,864 precincts x 46 delegate ballots = 85,744 data points. I have not included the additional Congessional District Delegate races, only the statewide ones.

The chart below verifies and confirms dsw's observation:



On my data, 82,940 votes were cast for Paul's 1st delegate contest, but only 29,609 for him directly as President choice. -64%.

187 precincts have votes for Paul's 1st delegate, but none for him as President. Yes, that is 10% of them all.

In Lowndes County, votes for Paul as President are only a 10th of the votes for his 1st delegate on the list.

In Walker County, in the "Prospect Method. Chuch" precinct, Paul's 1st delegate contest collected 34 votes. Paul as a choice for President? 1 vote. One vote.

As can be seen on the chart, the other candidates tend to get 1 vote in the delegate contest for 1 in the President's choice, with little volatility above and below that, as per the Republican party rule reiterated on the ballot itself. Paul's distribution of votes is from a different planet.

More to come.

Edit: How unusual is it to have 1/3 of the votes in the presidential preference vote that you get in the delegate races? Here is a partial answer:

[nobody's_hero]

Wow that's confusing as hell.

[parocks]

We went over this weeks ago.

See the precincts around tuscaloosa.

There were a lot of people, maybe 10% of the total, who filled out all the delegate spots. In many precincts where Ron Paul didn't get many votes - he got a lot of delegate votes. 5% for Paul, 10% voting for everything.

[anaconda]

I've never seen a ballot like this in CA....where there's all these delegates' names listed.

[parocks]

****************************
Tuscaloosa - U of A Student Rec
*************************

Gingrich
Range 38-30
Candidate Total 30

Paul
Range 29-24
Candidate Total 26

Romney
Range 48-32
Candidate Total 53

Santorum
Range 35-30
Candidate Total 34

****************************
Tuscaloosa - Green Acres Health
*************************

Gingrich
Range 4-3
Candidate Total 1

Paul
Range 5-4
Candidate Total 4

Romney
Range 4-3 (a single 4, in the middle)
Candidate Total 3

Santorum
Range 9-8
Candidate Total 10

****************************

*************************

[kathy88]

You'd think in alabama of all places the ballots would be a little more user friendly.

[kathy88]

Wasn't the issue with this initially that the bad ballots were by their laws supposed to have been thrown out?

[Titus]

Wait, somehow we got more votes for delegates than the straw poll?

[parocks]

On that day, it certainly did look like "vote fraud". "Why did Ron Paul get so many more votes for his delegates than he got himself? There must be vote fraud" was my thinking.

But I looked at the numbers and found that where Ron Paul did well, such as University of Alabama precincts, the number of votes for Ron Paul were about the number of votes for his delegates. "Range" = the most and least votes in the delegate election.

If there's a scandal, it's that Alabama allows people to vote for the delegates for all the candidates, not just the candidate they voted for.

[nobody's_hero]

You'd think in alabama of all places the ballots would be a little more user friendly.

I didnt' want to say that, lol.

At my small county convention here in Georgia, there were a dozen people present and it was pretty much, "Okay, who wants to be a delegate?. . . . Okay, you got it."